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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24514657">Let It Haunt You</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDarkFlygon/pseuds/TheDarkFlygon'>TheDarkFlygon</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Prism (Pride-Themed Oneshots) [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Non-Despair (Dangan Ronpa), Bisexual Male Character, Coming of Age, Dissociation, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Falling In Love, Gender Dysphoria, Happy Ending, LGBTQ Character, LGBTQ Themes, Light Angst, Love, Minor Harukawa Maki/Momota Kaito, Trans Male Character</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-03</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 07:40:57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,267</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24514657</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheDarkFlygon/pseuds/TheDarkFlygon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Shuichi's life hasn't always been very easy.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Akamatsu Kaede/Saihara Shuichi, Momota Kaito &amp; Saihara Shuichi</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Prism (Pride-Themed Oneshots) [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1769908</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>40</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Let It Haunt You</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>The self-projection mood is very big, these days. I'm trying not to dissociate the fuck out 24/7, you know?<br/>For the longest time, I tried to reject the trans Shuichi headcanon because I found it a bit... easy? reliant on clichés? "Oh, look, effeminate boy with a high-pitched, feminine voice! How *original* to make into an FtM character!". Thing is, I grew to like the headcanon, to adopt and embrace it, so fuck it, I'm doing this. This headcanon is also now one of mine. Yeet.</p><p>Every single time I write DR, I wonder why I haven't in a long time. The logical explanation to that is that, most of the time, I actually struggle focusing back on DR stuff, despite how much I've speculated on the characters and rewrote them to my tastes. However, when I finally get into the groove of things, it comes back to me naturally. Three years after first publishing Clocktower Vertigo and SymCac, your boi still hasn't entirely rusted over, it'd seem, lmao.</p><p>Today's prompt was "Life", so I came up with something that glances over a couple steps in a character's life. And, yes, this has copious amounts of self-projection. As always, I wanna say. The title is somewhat of a Sixx:A.M. reference.<br/>This story contains fairly graphic descriptions of gender dysphoria, including self-misgendering. If you don't think you can stomach it, I'd advise looking away. Reader discretion is, as always on this glorious site that is the AO3, advised.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Life hasn’t always been easy. In fact, up until a point, it seemed like it was out to get him, to make him go through the worst it had to offer; but that point has long since come by and gone, leaving Shuichi with one certainty: life used to be much worse and, now, it was blessing him.</p><p> </p><p>He began his game of life with the worst cards possible: a general physical frailness, a bad case of asthma and busy parents who weren’t quite ready to settle down and have a child, instead dropping him onto the lap of his uncle and running away to foreign countries to pursue grandiose careers and make their dreams of grandeur a reality. All in all, he could’ve very well not survived for long, suffering from health complications every year, yet always overcoming them, not without some meaningless pain.</p><p>He was a lonely child, wearing dresses against his will. It wasn’t that they were uncomfortable: they were just not something he really wanted to wear. Skirts, pigtails, ponytails, pearl bracelets… He really didn’t dislike them per say, but they just looked so much prettier on every single other girl than, in all truth, he just wanted to wear pants and read a book on his side of the playground…</p><p> </p><p>Teenage years were somehow even worse. His main issue wasn’t running out of air for no reason anymore: it was the way his body morphed without his consent. While he saw all the other boys grow facial hair, muscle mass and compare the sizes of what they had down there, he just watched life turn him into the doll he didn’t really enjoy playing with as a young child: flowered on his chest tumour-like lumps, flowed down his legs blood he didn’t know the origin of.</p><p>Auntie Ran explained him that was puberty, that he was progressively becoming a <em>woman</em>. It didn’t sound right, as if she were speaking to someone else that just wasn’t there, someone who’d have been happy about these changes. In the meantime, he was too timid to tell Auntie Ran that it scared him to bleed every month when his blood was already too limpid for its own good, that he didn’t want the weird things on his chest because he wasn’t… he didn’t want them, that was it! He didn’t need a reason not to like them!</p><p> </p><p>In the changing rooms, at the swimming pool, in the gymnasium where he’d be forced to change into even more ill-fitting clothing then forced to stay on a bench while everyone else was doing figures, he’d just contemplate things with passive thoughts and an inaccurate sense of time passing. Nothing would ever sit right, creeping from behind a corner and disturbing his train of thoughts. It was as if he didn’t exist in this world.</p><p>Well, life didn’t mean anything. It had no taste because it wasn’t his. It was that girl everybody spoke to, from his family to his teachers, with whom he kind of shared a body, but it was hers much more than it was his. It wasn’t fair, but what could he do about it? It wasn’t <em>his</em> body. He had no real power over it, and he didn’t even know why. He <em>was</em> that girl, right? He… He was a girl, right?</p><p> </p><p>Y-yeah, right. He was a girl and, like every other girl in middle school, she was doubting her sexuality. Guys were attractive, girls were attractive and, as much as loving other girls was wrong, it was what she was resonating with the most. Nothing wrong to see here, nothing wrong to see here! He was… <em>She</em> was just confused! Confused like everyone else!</p><p>The term for that appeared on her radar a couple months before graduating middle school: <em>bisexual</em>. A person who loves both genders, who is attracted to both guys and girls, with or without a preference for one of them. She resonated with the concept. That word defined her and she didn’t see anything wrong with it.</p><p>She didn’t see anything wrong with it, so she told Uncle Shinichi and Auntie Ran about it. They were a little confused, at first, but they didn’t mind. They were open, but warned her that, sadly, not everyone was like that, that people would try to hurt her if they knew because their hearts were tainted black from the poisonous parts of society.</p><p>Life was a little sweeter after that. Uncle and Auntie would regularly ask her if she was dating someone, if she had a crush on someone, when she’d bring a boyfriend or girlfriend home. Truth be told, he never thought of that, content with just finding quite a lot fo people pretty, attracted to blonde hair, to purple eyes, to purple hair.</p><p> </p><p>High school rolled around and so opened a new chapter of his… <em>her</em> story. It was a time of confusion, of being lost in the flow of life right before adulthood really began to smash into everyone’s lives. In the meantime, he was starting to figure out what was wrong with her exactly, all thanks to the Internet and hearing unfamiliar words thrown around as insults across the school.</p><p>In a way, it wasn’t that they were two different persons: he was the only person there, but he wasn’t a girl. He was a boy trapped in the wrong body and, now, he needed to live with that fact. He needed to negotiate with whatever was wrong in this situation… so he told Uncle and Auntie about it again.</p><p> </p><p>They were very confused by his words, that evening. Nevertheless, they let him explain himself, listening to him as he ran them down all he learnt online. They made some research on their own, discussed how to handle things from then on. Uncle Shinichi brought him to the psychiatrist so he could get a diagnosis and start physical treatments, Auntie Ran brought him to a hairdresser, bought him new masculine clothing, made sure he didn’t bind too much and maintained his binders all clean and snazzy.</p><p>For once, life was kind to him. His family was helping him and was getting his school to accept him as he was. Sure, he’d get glares from some people, fascinated stares from others, but most people didn’t really care. The more years went on and the more people forgot he was legally wearing another name and would be doing so until his majority.</p><p>When he graduated high school, Shuichi was Shuichi to the eyes of the law and those of society, and his friends were treating him as such.</p><p> </p><p>College brought him quite far away from home, into another prefecture. There, he met with a guy his age, Momota Kaito, who was in the physics course. They kind of instantly clicked as soon as Kaito spotted him eating alone at the cafeteria, giving him a tour of the university campus, giving him his phone number in case he needed anything, inviting him over for game nights or just to chill at the local coffeeshop.</p><p>Kaito may as well have been the brother he never had. Shuichi didn’t quite fall in love with him in the meaning that he’d have expected to, although this may have happened because, even before they met, Kaito had already started dating Maki. Instead, they developed a close platonic bond, sharing memories and secrets that even Maki wouldn’t know about (albeit she didn’t really care: she was herself a person privileging privacy and really didn’t prob around much when it was clear it was a “bro thing”, as Kaito would have called those).</p><p> </p><p>Shuichi was a bit envious of Kaito. He had a beautiful and trustworthy girlfriend, a nice flat he shared with her, a lot of friends, a brilliant future career in astrophysics and, well, he was a normal guy living his life. Sure, they had some deep conversations where they realized they were both bi and couldn’t really let go of the coincidence afterwards, but aside from this, Kaito was just much luckier than him. He wasn’t very open about these undisclosed negative thoughts, of course, afraid of backlash and afraid of losing his best friend, of losing a brother; but he should’ve known the wind would turn around.</p><p>Kaito eventually guessed it. Well, <em>Maki</em> did, actually, but she confronted him about it in front of her boyfriend, and they had a long, eventful conversation about it. Emotional and anxious, Shuichi’s deepest secret dropped to the ground, flowing from his mouth before he could stop the leak, and that’s how they both learnt of the one experience that defined so much in his life. To his luck, they accepted wholeheartedly, Kaito crushing him into a much-welcomed bear hug.</p><p> </p><p>And then it happened.</p><p>He met what his parents, his extended family, his friends, and most of society would call “the one”.</p><p> </p><p>It was a pure coincidence. He had been invited to a party with Kaito and Maki and, as shy and socially awkward as ever, Shuichi stayed in a corner, watching his friends have the time of their lives as his best friend made his girlfriend dance with him, which she eventually accepted (even if it took some convincing. In the end, Maki seemed like she had some fun partaking in a couple dances, but Kaito quickly found himself sitting with her at a table in another part of the room).</p><p>But, before Maki and Kaito stopped dancing, someone sat at the table he was checking his phone over. With the intense yet bizarre lighting of a college student’s party, he couldn’t quite make out her features at first, but he also didn’t find in himself the strength to say no when she asked. Before he knew it, they were chatting about random stuff until the end of his stay at the party, making him forget the loneliness and anxiety of attending a party run by people he didn’t know.</p><p> </p><p>Her name was Akamatsu Kaede, and she was studying music in the same university as him. She was already somewhat of a professional piano player but preferred studying a little more in case she needed to change careers for some reason. Her voice was soft, her words sweet, and he couldn’t help but find comfort in speaking to her: she was alluring, charismatic and kind. He couldn’t ask for more.</p><p>For once, he was the one to ask for her phone number when they finally had to go their separate ways, gathering most of his courage to do so. She chuckled when she saw how red his face had turned, but nonetheless gave him her number without hesitation, wishing him a safe trip home, especially when she saw how drunk Kaito was and how bothered Maki was by that fact.</p><p> </p><p>The more time went and the more Shuichi spent time with Kaede. They ate lunch together, sometimes with Kaito and Maki and sometimes on their own, they had study dates and, before he really knew it, actual dates in various places. The park, the library, the local ice cream parlour, the museum, the cafés, the commercial district, the mall, his flat, her flat, even the college campus itself: everything would become their date fields. That’s where he discovered her favourite flavour was vanilla, that she had a twin sister, that she had dated both a guy and a couple girls before, that her favourite compositor was Debussy and that she really, really loved romantic comedies, much to her chagrin.</p><p>Still, and because of how deep their bond was growing even without uttering such words as “let’s go steady”, it just didn’t sit right with him that he was so stealthy about it. It wasn’t just that binding for long periods of time would damage his ribcage: she’d eventually find out, whether it be by accident or because his top surgery was coming sooner than he expected, and he didn’t want her to feel betrayed like he was afraid Kaito and Maki would. Life had finally turned better and he didn’t want to let it escape from his control yet again.</p><p> </p><p>When he finally told his girlfriend about it, Shuichi was sweating heavily and his breath was so shaky he thought he’d have an asthma attack right here and there. He had overthought every single outcome of this, almost planning how to recover from incoming heartbreak; but none of that happened. All of the bad endings he had imagined and all the terrifying what-ifs he had come up with got pulverized in a single sentence shot straight through the black clouds he had fabricated to shelter him.</p><p><em>And?</em> Kaede told him, a smile on her face. <em>I love you anyway, Shuichi. It doesn’t change that fact and it never will. </em>She took him in his arms and, face buried in her chest, he had never felt so safe. She was powerful and she was on his side; he couldn’t have asked for more.</p><p> </p><p>Tonight, they’re all graduating college and, as he listens to Uncle Shinichi and Auntie Ran’s heartfelt compliments with tears in his eyes, hears Kaito’s hearty laugh and holds Kaede’s hand as she hums her favourite symphonies out of the top of her head, there’s only one thing about life that Shuichi is sure of: despite all of the hardships and the moments where he had his fair share of doubts and misery, things got better, and life was now something he treasured.</p><p>A life that, of course, he’ll share with his close and loved ones. It just wouldn’t have the same sweetness to it otherwise.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p><em> It's so beautiful, so beautiful,</em><br/>And everything that breaks you will not make you who you are. </p></blockquote></div></div>
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